Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Brick: A Literary Journal #92

So. Why has Harriet Martineau become so little known? It’s
even more of a mystery when you begin to examine the life and work of Harriet
Martineau, by which I mean simply to skim the surface, like I’ve been doing
these past few months, lift the corner of the beginnings of what there is to
know about this writer and find this versatility: campaigner, autobiographer,
biographer, translator, philosopher, novelist, political economist, travel
writer, world’s first writer of a how-to book, world’s first female journalist
to be retained by a paper as one of its key writers—for she wrote nigh on two
thousand anonymous leaders for the London paper the Daily News, particularly making use of contacts she’d made on trips
to the United States when it came to covering the American Civil War. (Ali
Smith, “The Hour and the Woman”)

Reading
might be a tricky thing these days (given the invention of baby), but I’ve been
slowly going through the new issue of Brick: A Literary Journal (#92, winter 2014). The issue opens with a piece by Ali Smith, “The Hour and the Woman,” on the writer Harriet Martineau (1780-1877),
and presented as “The inaugural Harriet Martineau lecture, in celebration of
Norwich, UNESCO City of Literature.” One of my favourite prose writers for some
time, Smith explores the life, influence and legacy of Norwich-born Martineau,
writing that “When Virginia Woolf makes a speech about professions for women to
the National Society for Women’s Service in January 1931, she lists the names
of the women who’ve ‘made the path smooth’ for her, not only smooth but
possible at all, as a woman whose profession is literature. ‘For the road was
cut many years ago,’ she says, ‘by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet
Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot.’” I’ve always been partial, myself,
to seeking out the disappeared, given that the reasons for disappearance are
always so slight, so random, and forgetfulness is far easier than you might
imagine. It would seem a clear oversight that any writer on such a list would
have fallen by the wayside to by nearly completely forgotten, especially given
the breath, volume and influence of the works published by Martineau throughout
her lifetime. Smith continues: “This ‘irrepressibility’ might be one of the
reasons she’s not read as much as she might be now. Her writing is, shall we
say, fountainous. Another reason might be that the changes of which she’s the vanguard
have all happened; we take them for granted.”

Everything was
agitation amidships, hither-thither, hurry-hurry. The crewmen, half-naked,
desiccated, and feverish, ran to the bridge and contemplated the city
jubilantly; they pointed at the yellowed and twisted features of the palatial
buildings as if these were mirages from their deliria during the passage, or as
if they recognized them and were confirming the accuracy of the engravings they
had been shown in the mother country to beguile them with the pageantry of
America. Then they turned the other way, toward the pink towers of the churches
and the light green crowns of the royal palms that swayed like cool sprouting
grass the length of the port’s boulevard. They ran singing and whistling back
to their cabins and tossed bucketfuls of water at one another, swabbing their
pale sopping hides now that they no longer had to go even without drinking to
make the water last. (“It’s Going to Snow,” Severo Sarduy, trans. Mark Fried)

And
of course, I’ve only space to even mention less than half of what lives inside
the nearly two hundred pages of issue number ninety-two. One of the really
highlights of the issue is a piece by Victoria fiction writer Yasuko Thanh, who
writes elegantly and memorably on photography and memory in her piece “Memento
Mori,” that includes:

I came across an artist on YouTube, Michael David, who’d
built a greenhouse out of glass daguerreotypes because the story, mythologized
in a few seconds in a documentary film on the Civil War, haunted him so. Linda Bierds
wrote a series of poems about glass-plate greenhouses for her book The Profile Makers. Collage artist
Michael Oatman recreated the structure with a group of architectural students.

Ideas make me think of seed pods. They way they burst and
scatter and float and settle and sit and warm to the dirt. Take root, grow too
stubborn to pull out.

In fact, the story isn’t true. The Library of Congress
can account for the majority of the glass plates in the Civil War Collection—even
broken plates are painstakingly collected, each sliver in its own pocket. No collection
is missing enough plates to have built a field of greenhouses.

But as with most legends, the message about transience is
true. It’s what I think about when I think of photographs. We don’t want to be
betrayed by time. We want our memories to stick around.

Another
highlight is by American poet C.D. Wright, who provides the most thoughtful and
exquisite short essay on a poem by Michael Ondaatje, his “Driving with Dominic
/ in the Southern Province / We See Hints of the Circus” from his collection Handwriting (Toronto ON: McClelland and
Stewart, 1998). She ends her piece with:

There are no
grand strategies at work in this poem. There is no sabotage to syntax or
sequence in which information is delivered. There is no pronounced rhythm. No ulterior
philosophical message. With terrific economy a lush environment is suggested. With
characteristic restraint a little world is made. One blogger dismissed the poem
as something as easy to write as striking a match and blowing it out. It could
well have been so simply bestowed, that effortlessly executed. The poem could
be the nucleus of one of the central characters and narratives of a novel to
come, Divisadero, for instance. I suggest
that it is.